


built on sand

by lacecat



Series: BSFSW [1]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: BSFSW, Canon Compliant, Canon Dialogue, Extended Scene, F/F, Rings, that one scene in 301 where max is in the bath and she talks to anne and they're sad and in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 12:06:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15751341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lacecat/pseuds/lacecat
Summary: I like it in this room. Reminds me that nothing has changed yet.





	built on sand

**Author's Note:**

> for day 1 of Black Sails Fem Slash Week!!! (canon pairings)
> 
> just a quick extension of that one scene bc I always have feelings about it and the rest of s3 with their relationship (there was supposed to be SEX in the TUB but it was just SAD)

She was already in the bath when Anne had entered the room.  Max faces the window as her body stays mostly submerged in the tub, the water around her the color of a sky before snow. As they sit in silence, the words still strung out in the air between them, Anne feels like it could be snow piling up, each snowflake slowly building into a real weight, a deep drift. 

 

She was careful not to interrupt this tiny place of peace, where the moans and sighs are muted for once, as she set her sword down onto the table, felt the weight lift off her shoulders and settle down on the floorboards where she sat. When she had turned to face Max fully, as she had talked about gold and ruins and sand, Anne had felt her heartbeat in her knees, pounding and thrumming until she can’t hear anything else. 

 

_I like it in this room. Reminds me that nothing has changed yet._

 

Max is quiet after she speaks. Perhaps she’s letting Anne thinks about how she’s going to suggest this plan to Jack, perhaps just waiting for Anne to speak, now. Anne watches her, though, rather than ruin the quiet. She’s never been one to talk, anyways, as her hearing clears, as she takes the time to recognize all that they could lose. 

 

She watches Max’s hands instead of trying to see whatever is going across her face. Max’s hands glide in and out of the bath, the fingertips breaking the cloudy surface before lifting once again, like a figure emerging from the snowstorm seeking the warmth of a shelter. They don’t get snow in Nassau, or nothing to compare to the image that strikes her about it, but she thinks that if she tried to explain it to Max, it wouldn’t sound so bad, even stumbling from her tongue, that she looks at something as simple as Max’s hands and sees that warmth. 

 

 

_What ain’t real about it?_

 

Anne had gone and sat with her back to the tub when she had come in. That’s new, too - being able to turn away from someone who isn’t Jack. Someone who Anne knows can undoubtably destroy her - the funny thing is, she would turn away in that moment, just so that Max wouldn’t have to bear the betrayal in her eyes.

 

“I’ll have to speak with him soon,” Max says, her voice still low. She doesn’t move, though, seeming content to sit in this moment along her. "If I am to convince him, the idea will need to be approached with caution." 

 

She wonders if Max’s hands ever stop moving. She hasn’t got any bone in her as graceful as those hands, Anne thinks, nothing that would manage to fit under her skin without breaking it. But Max, Max can make a bath look contemplative, her lies seem like mercy, her plan like something that they can achieve. 

 

Right now, Max wears two rings on her right hand, both not unlike the ones that Jack likes to wear. Anne looks at them as Max lifts her hand, pretending like she knows that Anne hasn’t been staring at them for most of this time. She recognizes them as particular favorites, ones that Max comes back to wearing more often than the others. 

 

The flat silver one was a gift from one of the whores, Anne remembers Max telling her one time. She hadn’t understood the significance until she watches Max touch it during a conversation with a few of the pirate captains, realized that she had worn it to every negotiation ever since they had gotten their hands on that damned gold. The silver one’s something that Max wears to ground herself, remind herself of the power she wields, she supposes, or else she wears it to remind everyone the chair in which she sits in. 

 

The green one, though, is a mystery. Anne reaches in before she can stop herself, her coat sleeve dragging a little in the water as her finger comes just shy of touching it. 

 

She looks up, meets Max’s gaze. “You wear this one a lot,” Anne says. She touches it, then, feels the ridge of the gem under her nail. 

 

Max flexes her hand a little, as if to study the ring as well. “I was born near an empty field, unused by anyone,” Max starts, as Anne traces the decoration. “When I was small, my mother would brush out my hair in the evening, when we were done for the day. I would watch the wind pass through the grass, and I would imagine going out in that field - the feeling of the blades passing by my fingertips.”

 

Her sleeve is getting soaked, but Anne doesn’t move back. Max continues, “Perhaps I would run far away from the house that had caused us so much misery. My mother would come with me, and I thought once we cleared that field, that we would be free. Every night, I would dream of the scent of that grass, then imagine the color of the dirt on the far side of that patch that seemed so narrow and yet so insurmountable.”

 

She turns her hand a little, so Anne’s finger slides across, to the pointed edge of the metal on the top of the ring. “When she died, we buried her in that field."

 

_Because it is built upon things I cannot control, cannot predict._

 

Max says, "She never owned a single piece of jewelry, but I would think she would have liked it. The color reminds me of that past, of a time when I loved and lost her.”

 

 _Loss_. It’s a funny thing, Anne thinks, to have something gnaw at you, consume you, and for you to catalogue the difference like it’s something that you’ve done, instead of it being stolen from you in the first place. 

 

She’s thought she’s lost Jack many times in the past - the acute agony that it had been, to think that he was dead or close to it - it’s something that brings bile to her throat to think about it for too long. 

 

She’s not stupid. While her and Jack have been burning ever since they had crossed paths, she knows where that’s going to end up. Whether both of them end up with their necks in twin nooses, or one of them making sure to follow the other into whatever comes next, she only knows the end to their path. She’s made peace with it, she thinks, now they’ve had the taste of what could be possible.

 

Max, though - 

 

Max, she’s burning hot and bright already with her, the flames reaching high into the sky. There’s no controlled burn with her, and Anne’s stepped into the fire because she’s the one who’s been looking for that warmth, greedy for it like nothing else, Max at her side, at her bed in night, an impossible future that she thinks they both crave like nothing else. 

 

Max takes back her hand, dips it back into the water. Her eyes look distant, like she’s considering that past, the loss that she alludes to like the future that they both know will come. 

 

Anne has killed for her. If she would think that it was something that Max didn’t know, she would say that she would die for her. Let her live, because she has never believed in God, but she thinks that there’s something holy in the water that drips down the side of Max’s shoulder, something she would let rest on her tongue, chase the taste like she’s parched in a desert. Let her lose this, if it means to taste it now, because she's rather die than not have it at all. 

 

Right now, though she can look at Max, watch the aimless movements of her hand, savor the time she has to do so. She’s used to such things getting ripped from her hands - pretty and nice things are never meant for her - but Max isn’t something that can be moved, altered beyond her say. She’s made with something that’s stronger than the anger that’s built up in Anne, the pride or pressure that Jack faces - she’s made with her own creations, her own will. When she had talked about moving the gold - _making Anne choose, making her tear in two_ \- Max had looked right into her eye, like she needed to confirm whatever was bleeding out there, and she’s always been the strong one, out of any of them. 

 

_You’re getting awfully close to doing the one thing you said you’d never do._

 

She’s taken to wearing her hair in braids, recently. Even in the bath, when Max lets her hair close to free, there’s still a braid along the top of her head, fastened somewhere behind her ear.  Anne drinks in the sight of the hair curling along her temples, the half-moons of her fingertips before they disappear once again. 

 

“I should get you a ring,” Anne says, _something with no memories attached to it_. “Something between us.”

 

She doesn’t quite think of the implied meaning behind her words, and as they come out, she wonders if it's one of the many things they don't - can't - talk about. But she doesn’t take it back, even as Max’s hand stills, the finger still dipped into the milky water, because she's growing tired of not talking about things that they can't have. 

 

Rings are for the future. They’re promises, ones that neither of them can keep. Rings aren’t for them. 

 

She knows that gold would look good on her hands. 

 

“That would be nice,” Max says, quiet still, after what feels like an eternity. She pushes her hand underneath the water once again, and Anne imagines she’s chasing the last of the warmth left in that water.

 


End file.
